Payment Holidays

Wondering what payment holidays are? Let’s take a look first at the current landscape, which drawn out by the coronavirus pandemic, has made many businesses face unexpected hardships. Creditors and financial institutions, aware of clients’ struggles during trying times, are increasingly willing to discuss a deferral in the payment schedule.

This way, they’re offering excellent customer service to clients in times when they need it the most. This kind of service is known as a payment holiday, a postponement in payment obligations for a negotiated and temporary period. 

If you’re looking to offer payment holidays to your customers, keep reading to learn the pros and cons of implementing them and how you can most effectively manage your payment holiday requests.

Payment holidays offer greater flexibility for your clients’ finances, giving them one less thing to worry about when their income runs low. Reducing monthly expenditure in the short term will help them get on their feet much quicker, and it’s also a much better option for both parties than falling into arrears.

Times like the ones we live in make it necessary to offer this service – most creditors already do so, and clients could feel they’re being left on their own if their lender denies them a payment holiday. 

Effective management of payment holiday requests

Banks and creditors can only offer payment holidays after a thorough individual assessment of each clients’ situation and their specific needs. If they want to provide excellent customer service when it comes to payment holidays, they’ll need close management of requests and how they evolve. 

From a management perspective, monitoring requests through an app will let administrators check the status of any payment holiday application in real-time, allowing them to see which requests are not moving forward. Creating universal benefits for the business by reducing churn and understanding where your teams require investment can have immediate positive impacts.

Customers also see the benefits if lenders manage requests digitally – information is at their disposal anywhere, the processing time for the app is shorter, and overall, they’ll receive a much more personalised customer experience. 

VASS experience on payment holidays

VASS’ work and experience prove that the construction of these solutions allows new methods of inbound communications and management of new requests, as well as providing a space to monitor SLAs, milestones and many more benefits. 

We believe that by implementing digital solutions, lenders can offer solutions adapted to the current times whilst they remain cost-effective and avoid churns. In VASS, we’re able to build solutions that support lenders in the prioritisation of these Debt repayment and payment holidays requests. This will help lenders deliver the best customer experience, supporting their customers through challenging times and maximising their resources.